Portworx with CSI

CSI, or Container Storage Interface, is the new model for integrating storage system service with Kubernetes and other orchestration systems. Kubernetes has had support for CSI since 1.10 as beta.

With CSI, Kubernetes gives storage drivers the opportunity to release on their schedule. This allows storage vendors to upgrade, update, and enhance their drivers without the need to update Kubernetes, maintaining a consistent, dependable, orchestration system.

Install

Install using the Portworx spec generator

When Generating the Portworx specs select CSI under Customize->Advanced Settings. This will add the CSI components to the Portworx DaemonSet.

If you are using curl to fetch the Portworx spec, you can add csi=true to the parameter list to include CSI specs in the generated file.

Openshift users: You will need to add the px-csi-account service account to the privileged security context.

oc adm policy add-scc-to-user privileged system:serviceaccount:kube-system:px-csi-account

Impact on applications

The only affected object is the StorageClass. For any StorageClasses created, you will need to setup the value of provisioner to com.openstorage.pxd. Here is an example:

kind: StorageClass
apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
metadata:
  name: portworx-csi-sc
provisioner: com.openstorage.pxd
parameters:
  repl: "3"

To create a PersistentVolumeClaims, simply reference the above StorageClass.

kind: PersistentVolumeClaim
apiVersion: v1
metadata:
   name: px-mysql-pvc
spec:
   storageClassName: portworx-csi-sc
   accessModes:
     - ReadWriteOnce
   resources:
     requests:
       storage: 2Gi

Upgrade

Currently upgrades are not supported. You will need to deploy using CSI onto a new Kubernetes cluster. The Kubernetes community is working very hard to make this possible in the near future.

Contribute

Portworx welcomes contributions to our CSI implementation, which is open-source and repository is at OpenStorage.